Monday, September 30, 2024

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NASA Analysis Shows Irreversible Sea Level Rise for Pacific Islands - EARTH

Pacific Island nations such as Kiribati — a low-lying country in the southern Pacific Ocean — are preparing now for a future of higher sea levels.

NASA Earth Observatory

Climate change is rapidly reshaping a region of the world that’s home to millions of people.

In the next 30 years, Pacific Island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Fiji will experience at least 8 inches (15 centimeters) of sea level rise, according to an analysis by NASA’s sea level change science team. This amount of rise will occur regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions change in the coming years.

The sea level change team undertook the analysis of this region at the request of several Pacific Island nations, including Tuvalu and Kiribati, and in close coordination with the U.S. Department of State.

In addition to the overall analysis, the agency’s sea level team produced high-resolution maps showing which areas of different Pacific Island nations will be vulnerable to high-tide flooding — otherwise known as nuisance flooding or sunny day flooding — by the 2050s. Released on Sept. 23, the maps outline flooding potential in a range of emissions scenarios, from best-case to business-as-usual to worst-case.

“Sea level will continue to rise for centuries, causing more frequent flooding,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, who directs ocean physics programs for NASA’s Earth Science Division. “NASA’s new flood tool tells you what the potential increase in flooding frequency and severity look like in the next decades for the coastal communities of the Pacific Island nations.”

Team members, led by researchers at the University of Hawaii and in collaboration with scientists at the University of Colorado and Virginia Tech, started with flood maps of Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Nauru, and Niue. They plan to build high-resolution maps for other Pacific Island nations in the near future. The maps can assist Pacific Island nations in deciding where to focus mitigation efforts.

“Science and data can help the community of Tuvalu in relaying accurate sea level rise projections,” said Grace Malie, a youth leader from Tuvalu who is involved with the Rising Nations Initiative, a United Nations-supported program led by Pacific Island nations to help preserve their statehood and protect the rights and heritage of populations affected by climate change. “This will also help with early warning systems, which is something that our country is focusing on at the moment.”

Future Flooding

The analysis by the sea level change team also found that the number of high-tide flooding days in an average year will increase by an order of magnitude for nearly all Pacific Island nations by the 2050s. Portions of the NASA team’s analysis were included in a sea level rise report published by the United Nations in August 2024.  

Areas of Tuvalu that currently see less than five high-tide flood days a year could average 25 flood days annually by the 2050s. Regions of Kiribati that see fewer than five flood days a year today will experience an average of 65 flood days annually by the 2050s.

“I am living the reality of climate change,” said Malie. “Everyone (in Tuvalu) lives by the coast or along the coastline, so everyone gets heavily affected by this.” 

Flooding on island nations can come from the ocean inundating land during storms or during exceptionally high tides, called king tides. But it can also result when saltwater intrudes into underground areas and pushes the water table to the surface. “There are points on the island where we will see seawater bubbling from beneath the surface and heavily flooding the area,” Malie added.

Matter of Location

Sea level rise doesn’t occur uniformly around the world. A combination of global and local conditions, such as the topography of a coastline and how glacial meltwater is distributed in the ocean, affects the amount of rise a particular region will experience.

“We’re always focused on the differences in sea level rise from one region to another, but in the Pacific, the numbers are surprisingly consistent,” said Ben Hamlington, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the agency’s sea level change science team lead.

The impacts of 8 inches (15 centimeters) of sea level rise will vary from country to country. For instance, some nations could experience nuisance flooding several times a year at their airport, while others might face frequent neighborhood flooding equivalent to being inundated for nearly half the year.

Researchers would like to combine satellite data on ocean levels with ground-based measurements of sea levels at specific points, as well as with better land elevation information. “But there’s a real lack of on-the-ground data in these countries,” said Hamlington. The combination of space-based and ground-based measurements can yield more precise sea level rise projections and improved understanding of the impacts to countries in the Pacific.  

“The future of the young people of Tuvalu is already at stake,” said Malie. “Climate change is more than an environmental crisis. It is about justice, survival for nations like Tuvalu, and global responsibility.”

To explore the high-tide flooding maps for Pacific Island nations, go to: https://sealevel.nasa.gov 

By: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Source: NASA Analysis Shows Irreversible Sea Level Rise for Pacific Islands - NASA 

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Saturday, September 28, 2024

In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars - UNIVERSE

Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.

Image A: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (NIRCam Image)

What appears as a faint dot in this James Webb Space Telescope image may actually be a groundbreaking discovery. Detailed information on galaxy GS-NDG-9422, captured by Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, indicates that the light we see in this image is coming from the galaxy’s hot gas, rather than its stars. Astronomers think that the galaxy’s stars are so extremely hot (more than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 80,000 degrees Celsius) that they are heating up the nebular gas, allowing it to shine even brighter than the stars themselves.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alex Cameron (Oxford)

“My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” said lead researcher Alex Cameron of the University of Oxford.

Cameron reached out to colleague Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb’s observations.

“It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local universe, which makes sense because the early universe was a very different environment,” said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.

In the local universe, typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius). According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit (80,000 degrees Celsius).

The research team suspects that the galaxy is in the midst of a brief phase of intense star formation inside a cloud of dense gas that is producing a large number of massive, hot stars. The gas cloud is being hit with so many photons of light from the stars that it is shining extremely brightly.

Image B: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 Spectrum (NIRSpec)

This comparison of the data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope with a computer model prediction highlights the same sloping feature that first caught the eye of astronomer Alex Cameron, lead researcher of a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The bottom graphic compares what astronomers would expect to see in a "typical" galaxy, with its light coming predominantly from stars (white line), with a theoretical model of light coming from hot nebular gas, outshining stars (yellow line). The model comes from Cameron’s collaborator, theoretical astronomer Harley Katz, and together they realized the similarities between the model and Cameron's Webb observations of galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (top). The unusual downturn of the galaxy's spectrum, leading to an exaggerated spike in neutral hydrogen, is nearly a perfect match to Katz’s model of a spectrum dominated by super-heated gas. While this is still only one example, Cameron, Katz, and their fellow researchers think the conclusion that galaxy GS-NDG-9422 is dominated by nebular light, rather than starlight, is their strongest jumping-off point for future investigation. They are looking for more galaxies around the same one-billion-year mark in the universe’s history, hoping to find more examples of a new type of galaxy, a missing link in the history of galactic evolution.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

In addition to its novelty, nebular gas outshining stars is intriguing because it is something predicted in the environments of the universe’s first generation of stars, which astronomers classify as Population III stars.

“We know that this galaxy does not have Population III stars, because the Webb data shows too much chemical complexity. However, its stars are different than what we are familiar with – the exotic stars in this galaxy could be a guide for understanding how galaxies transitioned from primordial stars to the types of galaxies we already know,” said Katz.

At this point, galaxy 9422 is one example of this phase of galaxy development, so there are still many questions to be answered. Are these conditions common in galaxies at this time period, or a rare occurrence? What more can they tell us about even earlier phases of galaxy evolution? Cameron, Katz, and their research colleagues are actively identifying more galaxies to add to this population to better understand what was happening in the universe within the first billion years after the big bang.

“It’s a very exciting time, to be able to use the Webb telescope to explore this time in the universe that was once inaccessible,” Cameron said. “We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding.”

The research paper is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

By: NASA Webb Mission Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

Source: In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars - NASA Science 

LiDAR-based system allows unmanned aerial vehicle team to rapidly reconstruct environments

(a) Illustration of the proposed framework’s execution process. (b) 3D reconstruction result of the above scene produced by the proposed framework. Credit: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.02738

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have proved to be highly effective systems for monitoring and exploring environments. These autonomous flying robots could also be used to create detailed maps and three-dimensional (3D) visualizations of real-world environments.

Researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently introduced SOAR, a system that allows a team of UAVs to rapidly and autonomously reconstruct environments by simultaneously exploring and photographing them. This system, introduced in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server and set to be presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2024, could have numerous applications, ranging from the urban planning to the design of videogame environments.

"Our paper stemmed from the increasing need for efficient and high-quality 3D reconstruction using UAVs," Mingjie Zhang, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

"We observed that existing methods often fell into two categories: model-based approaches, which can be time-consuming and expensive due to their reliance on prior information, and model-free methods, which explore and reconstruct simultaneously but might be limited by local planning constraints. Our goal was to bridge this gap by developing a system that could leverage the strengths of both approaches." 

Credit: Zhang et al.

The primary objective of the recent study by Zhang and his colleagues was to create a heterogeneous multi-UAV system that could simultaneously explore environments and collect photographs, collecting data that could be used to reconstruct environments. To do this, they first set out to develop a technique for incremental viewpoint generation that adapts to scene information that is acquired over time.

In addition, the team planned to develop a task assignment strategy that would optimize the efficiency of the multi-UAV team, ensuring that it consistently collected the data necessary to reconstruct environments. Finally, the team ran a series of simulations to assess the effectiveness of their proposed system.

"SOAR is a LiDAR-Visual heterogeneous multi-UAV system designed for rapid autonomous 3D reconstruction," explained Zhang. "It employs a team of UAVs: one explorer equipped with LiDAR for fast scene exploration and multiple photographers with cameras for capturing detailed images."

The system overview of the proposed LiDAR-Visual heterogeneous multi-UAV system for fast aerial reconstruction. Credit: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.02738

To create 3D reconstructions, the team's proposed system completes various steps. Firstly, a UAV that they refer to as the "explorer" efficiently navigates and maps an environment employing a surface frontier-based strategy.

As this UAV gradually maps the environment, the team's system incrementally generates viewpoints that would collectively enable the full coverage of surfaces in the delineated environment. Other UAVs, referred to as photographers, will then visit these sites and collect visual data there.

"The viewpoints are clustered and assigned to photographers using the Consistent-MDMTSP method, balancing workload and maintaining task consistency," said Zhang. "Each photographer plans an optimal path to capture images from the assigned viewpoints. The collected images and their corresponding poses are then used to generate a textured 3D model."

A unique feature of SOAR is that it enables data collection by both LiDAR and visual sensors. This ensures the efficient exploration of environments and the production of high-quality reconstructions.

Trajectories generated and reconstruction results by our method, SSearchers, and Multi-EE in two scenes. Except for the explorer (the black trajectory) in our method, which does not participate in image capture, all other UAVs are involved in image acquisition tasks. Credit: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.02738

"Our system adapts to the dynamically changing scene information, ensuring optimal coverage with minimal viewpoints," said Zhang. "By consistently assigning tasks to UAVs, it also improves scanning efficiency and reduces unnecessary detours for photographers."

Zhang and his colleagues evaluated their proposed system in a series of simulations. Their findings were highly promising, as SOAR was found to outperform other state-of-the-art methods for environment reconstruction.

"A key achievement of our study is the introduction of a novel framework for fast autonomous aerial reconstruction," said Zhang. "Central to this framework is the development of several key algorithms that employ an incremental design, striking a crucial balance between real-time planning capabilities and overall efficiency, which is essential for online and dynamic reconstruction tasks."

In the future, SOAR could be used to tackle a wide range of real-world problems that require the fast and accurate reconstruction of 3D environments. For instance, it could be used to create detailed 3D models of cities and infrastructure or help historians preserve a country's cultural heritage, helping them reconstruct historic sites and artifacts.

"SOAR could also be used for disaster response and assessment," said Zhang. "Specifically, it could allow responders to rapidly assess damage after natural disasters and plan rescue and recovery efforts."

The team's system could additionally contribute to the inspection of infrastructure and construction sites, allowing workers to map these locations clearly. Finally, it could be used to create 3D models of video game environments inspired by real cities and natural landscapes.

"We are enthusiastic about the potential for future research in this area," said Zhang. "Our plans include bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap: We aim to tackle the challenges associated with transitioning SOAR from simulation to real-world environments. This will involve addressing issues like localization errors and communication disruptions that can occur in real-world deployments."

As part of their next studies, the researchers plan to develop new task allocation strategies that could further improve the coordination between different UAVs and the speed at which they map environments. Finally, they plan to add scene prediction and information processing modules to their system, as this could allow it to anticipate the structure of a given environment, further speeding up the reconstruction process.

"We will also explore the implementation of active reconstruction techniques, where the system receives real-time feedback during the reconstruction process," added Zhang.

"This will allow SOAR to adapt its planning on-the-fly and achieve even better results. Moreover, we will investigate incorporating factors like camera angle and image quality directly into the planning process, which will ensure that the captured images are optimized for generating high-quality 3D reconstructions. These research directions represent exciting opportunities to advance the capabilities of SOAR and push the boundaries of autonomous 3D reconstruction using UAVs." 

by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Source: LiDAR-based system allows unmanned aerial vehicle team to rapidly reconstruct environments (techxplore.com)

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